Remembering the victims of the first, Islamic terror attack in Los Angeles - Orange County Egyptian-immigrant nearly massacred EL AL Flight 106 ticket line on July 4th, 2002

"Los Angeles Airport -- top target of terror attacks, lax security, TSA agent arrested" Julia Davis wrote in Examiner.com Jan 22, 2010.

LAX should is no stranger to counter-terrorism. Three of the four planes involved in the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001 were originally headed for Los Angeles. American Airlines Flight 11, and United Airlines Flight 175, were from Logan International Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts, and American Airlines Flight 77 was from Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia.\ LAX has direct flights to North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East – more direct flights than any other airport in the world.

NY Senator Chuck Schumer said, "You don't have to be Albert Einstein to realize that flights that originate in foreign countries pose a greater danger. There's a perfect storm for airport security overseas. Lax security checks, complacent government officials, and terrorists who exploit them. During the Millenium holiday in 2000, Al-Qaeda attempted to bomb LAX, although the bomber, Ahmed Ressam, was apprehended in Port Angeles, Washington, with a cache of explosives in the trunk of his rented car. Ressam, also known as the Millenium Bomber, transported the explosives from Victoria, British Columbia, aboard the ferry "Coho".

Mr. Hadayat Belonged to Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s Operational Arm

Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 – both from Los Angeles - on the 4th of July at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, was revealed by intelligence and counter-terror sources as a Muslim extremist. During his ten years in the United States, he was a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad who maintained undercover links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the “blind sheikh” Abdul Rahim Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. Both are doing time for perpetrating the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.

This is the same cell that spawned El Sayyid Nosair, who assassinated the Judaic leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. Nosair's ties to the terror ring and it's goals might have been uncovered during the Kahane trial had the appropriate leads been followed. In the words of the Investigative Project's Steven Emerson, "Had there been a thorough analysis of the Nosair materials, and had there been more careful utilization of the Egyptian informant, the World Trade Center bombing could have been avoided."

Hadayat is also believed to have abetted a previous, contrived airline disaster: On October 31, 1999, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990, which also took off from Los Angeles Airport for Kennedy, New York. After Kennedy, the plane bound for Cairo plunged into the Atlantic off the Nantucket Island, Mass. coast, killing all 217 passengers and crew. In a special probe, the US National Transportation Safety Board found that the copilot Gameel el-Batouty was at the controls when the plane went into its dive. His voice was recorded shouting, “I put my faith in Allah!” (Source Terrorism 101 Debka LAX)

The victims of Hadayat's attack on El Al Flight 106 are commemorated each year at LAX on July 4th. In 2011, some of those who were there retold their experiences of that fateful, July 4, 2002 morning.



2012 marks the 10-year since the shooting. In addition to Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 who were killed, at least 4 more were wounded: Haim Sapir, the El Al security guard whose bullets ultimately stopped the attacker; Sarah Philips, a then 61-year old traveler from Canada; Arie Golan, then 54, who suffered superficial stab wounds; and an anonymous El Al security guard. Worthy of distinction is Dr. David Parkus, a trauma surgeon from Beaumont, Texas, who jumped in to wrestle the shooter.

How many more innocent Jewish and Israeli people have to get injured or murdered before the authorities supposed to be protecting us begin to acknowledge the motivations and protect the targets of Islamist extremism? Aggression directed at Jews never ends at Jews. It didn't with Germany's National Socialist Party and it didn't with the Islamist-killers of Rabbi Meir Kahane who went on, unfettered, to bomb the World Trade Center in '93. 

Updated 2022: Jews are the most frequent target of anti-religious hate crimes. A Jewish person is approximately twice as likely to suffer a hate crime than a black person or a Muslim, 10 times more likely than an Asian or a Latino and 20 times more likely than a non-Hispanic white. The majority of antisemitic acts against Jews in Europe are committed not by the Christian Right, but by Muslim immigrants.

As Jonathan Tobin, managing editor of JNS.com, wrote in "Don't Blame the Surge of European AntiSemitism on the Populists," National Review (5/19):

... the recent wave of immigrants from Muslim and Arab countries has created a vast new constituency for Jew-hatred. There is a long tradition of contempt for Jews in Islamic culture that has only been exacerbated by their resentment over the creation of Israel. Muslim expressions of hatred for Israel and Jews are now indistinguishable from the anti-Semitic invective of many Europeans. This has created a bizarre alliance among Muslims, leftist academics, and other elites who aim to delegitimize Israel, Zionism, and Jews.

Joanna Markind wrote in "Who is Behind Anti-Semitic Attacks in the US," The Tower (April/May '17):

The problem of Arab/Muslim anti-Semitic violence is especially prominent in Europe. According to a 2015 review by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), “Statistics for France and Great Britain from the last decade show that antisemitic perpetrators have been disproportionately of Muslim origin.” Conservative estimates for Britain, where Muslims are roughly five percent of the population, indicate they commit 20-30 percent of anti-Semitic hate crimes. In France, where eight percent of the population is Muslim, at least 30 percent of anti-Semitic incidents are perpetrated by Muslims and/or Arabs, and “adding the number of non-identified perpetrators, the actual percentage can be estimated to be above 50 percent,” according to ISGAP. A 2015 British parliamentary report noted that a “high proportion of [anti-Semitic] cases involved someone from a Muslim background.”